Devopsdays finally makes it to London!

For the upcoming edition of DevopsDays London I sat down with Gareth Rushgrove @garethr  (GR) – he’s the guy behind devopsweekly.com,  the newsletter the #devops community expects in their inbox every Sunday.

KB: So devopsdays is finally coming to London, after years of travelling around Europe. Although London has had a pretty active  #devops community, it’s finally happening. How come it took such a long time?

GR: London is a big city with too many technology conferences and events to count! Lots of people from London have made the trip for devopsdays events in Ghent, Hamburg and Gothenburg, as well as visiting events like Velocity and occasional London Devops meetups drawing 80 or more people, London has been well served. As the devops community has grown, however, it makes sense to have a devopsdays event in the UK.

KB: At the first #devopsdays in Ghent there was already a pretty large UK delegation. Why do you think there is such a broad interest in devops in the UK?

GR: The UK, and maybe London in particular, has an interesting mix of start-ups, large media companies and financial services organisations. This brings with it a large group of tech-savvy business people, developers and systems administrators, all looking for anything that makes often large complex organisations run better. Devops has grown out of this rich melting-pot of like-minded people too

KB: London has a mix of traditional enterprise and start-up cultures. Do you think that will impact the type of visitors to Devopsdays London? Will it be different to other events?

GR: I hope so. I think all the devopsdays events I’ve been to have had a local flavour to them. The different tribes in London, say the startup crowd around Old Street or the financial services companies around The City, often go to different events. I’m hoping devopsdays gets everyone together in one place to share ideas and stories.

KB:  As a long time devops enthusiast, what’s rocking your boat about Devopsdays London?

GR: Without question the quality of the talks. Real war stories from inside interesting, complex organisations with real problems (and hopefully some solutions). The open spaces format as well in the afternoon is always incredibly interesting too – it’s great to be able to discuss something that happened that week or the week before with other knowledgeable people.

Kris Buytaert is a long time Linux and Open Source Consultant. He’s one of instigators of the devops movement, currently working for Inuits.

He is frequently speaking at, or organizing different international conferences and has written about the same subjects in different Books, Papers and Articles

He spends most of his time working on bridging the gap between developers and operations
with a strong focus on High Availability, Scalability , Virtualisation and Large Infrastructure Management projects
hence trying to build infrastructures that can survive the 10th floor test, better known today as the cloud while actively promoting the devops idea !

His blog titled “Everything is a Freaking DNS Problem” can be found at http://www.krisbuytaert.be/blog/.